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Sunday, 14 February 2016

Watson: “The 1st
November 2006.”

For a significant
number of people in both the UK and Russia, the easiest way to bring this day
to mind is to recall the Champions League game which took place that evening,
between Arsenal and CSKA Moscow. Unusually, Sir Robert Owen’s report contains a
factual error in Part 6, paragraph 225 – he describes “Tuesday 31 October 2006”
as being “two days before a Champions League football match between Arsenal and
CSKA Moscow”. As all football fans know, Champions League games never take place
on Thursdays; onlyon
Tuesdays or Wednesdays. Owen is more reliable however, when at Part 6.228 he
names the people relevant to the Inquiry who attended this game:

“The core of the group was Mr
Lugovoy’s family – himself, his wife Svetlana, his two daughters Galina and
Tatiana, who were 19 and 20 respectively, and his eight year old son Igor. Also
in the group were Tatiana’s boyfriend, Maxim Begak, and a business partner of
Mr Lugovoy named Mr Sokolenko.”

6.229:“[…] Whilst in London
the group (with the exception of Mr Begak) stayed at the Millennium Hotel in
Grosvenor Square, Mayfair. They all flew home together on Friday 3 November.”

6.230:
“[…] DI Mascall referred to evidence that
Mr Lugovoy had made arrangements to obtain tickets for the football match from
Mr Shuppe, Mr Berezovsky’s son in law, in September 2006.”

Oddly,
Berezovsky’s name is completely absent from both of Richard Watson’s extended Newsnight
reports (the first being 20 minutes long, the second 8 minutes). Putting it
bluntly, this is like making a programme about Sherlock Holmes, and
specifically The Final Problem, without
mentioning Professor Moriarty. The analogy is not as far-fetched as one might
think. According to Wikipedia, Berezovsky was…

“…a doctor of technical
sciences, and author of…academic papers and studies such as
‘Binary relations in multi-criteria optimizations’ and ‘Multi-criteria
optimization: mathematical aspects’.”

In
Conan Doyle’s story, it is said of Moriarty that…

“At the age of twenty-one he
wrote a treatise upon the binomial theorem which has had a European vogue. On
the strength of it, he won the mathematical chair at one of our smaller
universities”.

Sir
Robert Owen doesn’t make the same omission, though he does rather gloss over Mrs
Justice Gloster’s 2012 judgment (as quoted on page 1). Exiled in London since
2000, Berezovsky yearned one day to return to the Russian political arena, but
he understood more clearly than most that in politics, reputation is
everything. It seems reasonable to suppose therefore that the 2012 judgement,
leading as it did to his being labelled ‘the disgraced oligarch Boris Berezovsky’,
was a contributory factor in his suicide in March 2013.

According
to Wikipedia:

“After Berezovsky's death, a
spokesman for President Putin reported that he had sent a letter to the Russian
president, asking for permission to return to Russia and seeking
"forgiveness for his mistakes." Some of Berezovsky's associates
doubted the letter's existence, claiming that it was out of character. However,
his girlfriend at the time, Katerina Sabirova, later confirmed in an interview
that he did in fact send the letter:

"I said that they will
publish it and you will look bad. And that it won’t help. He answered that it
was all the same to him, that in any case all sins were blamed on him and that
this was his only chance."

It was claimed by anonymous
sources that rival Roman Abramovich delivered the letter to Putin personally,
having received an apology from Berezovsky himself. Both Putin's chief of
staff, Sergei Ivanov, and Abramovich's spokesman alluded to the letter being
passed by a "certain person", but did not go into details due to the
personal nature of the issue.”

Watson: “Alexander Litvinenko caught on CCTV, on his
way to a meeting with two former Russian spies at the upmarket Millennium Hotel
in central London.”

A
factual inaccuracy on Watson’s part - according to Sir Robert Owen’s report, only
one of the two Russians, Andrei Lugovoy, was a former member of the KGB. Having
known Lugovoy since childhood, Dmitri Kovtun served in the Soviet then Russian
army and was posted to Germany. He deserted in early 1992 however, travelling
with his then wife to Hamburg and claiming asylum.

“He [Litvinenko] thought he was
among friends.”

By the
standards of the often unsavoury circles in which all three of them moved, he was among friends. Indeed both Lugovoy
and Litvinenko (in his police interview of 18 November) testified that they had
more than one friendly telephone conversation, after the poisoning. In the same interview though, it’s true that Litvinenko
confirms he was deliberately trying to keep the two Russians in the dark as to
any suspicion which might fall on them, so as to leave open the possibility of luring
them back to London. One other thing to note; of the two Russians, he was inclined
to be more suspicious of Dmitri Kovtun, primarily because he didn’t know him
(as witnessed by his thinking his first name was ‘Vadim’ rather than ‘Dmitri’).
He therefore assumed incorrectly that either then or in the past he must have
worked for the KGB and/or FSB.

“22 days later, he was dead. It
was perhaps the most audacious murder on British soil ever, a crime that
shocked the world. We followed the evidence at the public inquiry into his
murder, interviewing all the key witnesses in this extraordinary story, and
revisiting the key locations.

Alexander Litvinenko was the
Russian spy who turned against his old paymasters.”

There
is more than a hint of euphemism about this, but no need to labour the point.

About Me

Hi, I'm James Bruce, a 41 year old chap from Bristol in England. I set off on 22 March 2013 from Blantyre, Scotland, with the aim of reaching Blantyre, Malawi, with God's help. I am raising money for Mary's Meals, the non-denominational charity that feeds children worldwide and helps them gain an education. I paid for all my expenses myself, thanks to a legacy from my late grandfather. If you would like to donate please call call 0800 698 1212 or visit www.marysmeals.org.uk.
I hope you will accompany me on this journey from wherever you are! God bless, James